In a blog post today, Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz, one of the Google+ leaders, said the company plans to shutter Buzz "in a few weeks." He noted that Buzz users will be able to view the posts created on Buzz in their Google Profile, and download them using Google Takeout.

"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past," Horowitz wrote. "We learned a lot from products like Buzz and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today's announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome."

Privacy issues were only one problem, though. Buzz simply never had the kind of great features that could lure enough users to make the service valuable. It certainly never threatened Facebook, the company Google, then as now, hopes to compete with in social networking. Buzz quickly faded to afterthought.

"We think the time has come for us to focus our energy on projects that will have the most impact to the most users," Horowitz wrote. "With the majority of Buzz users now here on Google+, it became obvious that all of our attention should be focused on this community."

Horowitz also noted that the privacy flap over Buzz forced Google to put more focus on giving users control over who gets to see what posts in Google+. In particular, it led directly to the three-month-old service's Circles feature, which lets users easily select which of their followers get access to specific posts.

"We learned privacy is not a feature...it is foundational to the product," Horowitz wrote.

He also noted that the immediate backlash over privacy concerns led his team to gradually roll out Google+, in order to fine tune the system before opening the service to the masses last month.

"Probably the best lesson we learned is about how to introduce a product," Horowitz wrote. "We started very slowly with Google+--in a limited Field Trial--in order to listen and learn and gather plenty of real-world feedback."

Buzz isn't the only Google business getting the ax. The company is also shutting down its Google Labs site, a move it announced in July. And the Boutiques.com and Like.com Web sites will be replaced by Google Product Search.

Google is also killing Jaiku, a Twitter-like service it acquired in 2007. Its iGoogle social-networking feature will disappear on January 15. On the same date, Code Search, designed to help users find open-source code on the Web, will also shut down.

About the author

Jay Greene, a CNET senior writer, works from Seattle and focuses on investigations and analysis. He's a former Seattle bureau chief for BusinessWeek and author of the book "Design Is How It Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons" (Penguin/Portfolio).
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